hasu writes: Scientists at the National Institute for Materials Science at Tsukuba in Japan have created a device that can simultaneously carry out 16 times the operations of a normal computer transistor, and hope that eventually it will reach a level of about 1000 times the operations. Inspired by brain cells, a sharp needle sends an electrical pulse to a collection of molecules known as duroquinone. A single duroquinone is surrounded by sixteen others, and weak chemical bonds allow a pulse to the central duroquinone to shift all seventeen molecules in a variety of ways. Each duroquinone has four different "settings," so a single pulse can have 4^16 = 4.3 billion outcomes, as opposed to a normal 2-state bit setting.